Monday, November 20, 2017

CRNAs Hijack State Licensure

The audacity of advanced practice nurses, which include CRNAs, knows no bounds. And in this case, no state borders. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing has developed a blueprint they are trying to advance in state legislatures to allow APRNs to practice in a state without actually being officially licensed to work there.

The NCSBN is advocating legislation called an APRN Compact. If a state approves the Compact, then an APRN who is licensed in another state which also is in the compact will automatically be allowed to work there. It also allows the APRN to write prescriptions for controlled and non-controlled substances in any state within the Compact. The Compact specifically says if a state in the Compact allows APRNs to work independently without physician supervision, then all states in the Compact will do the same, even if the state had not previously given this privilege to nurses.

I don't understand why any state would get sucked into this hoodwink. Why would a state allow somebody to practice there without a formal licensing review? Physicians certainly don't have that ability, and we have thousands of hours more training and undergo far more rigorous reviews before being licensed to practice. It seems like a recipe for disaster if a nurse can leave a state under a cloud for poor performance and instantly start working in another state since nobody at the state level would have reviewed their records.

Currently the APRN Compact has been approved in three states: Idaho, Wyoming, and North Dakota. It will start taking effect once ten states have approved it. The ASA is urging the AMA and other medical societies to counter this confiscation of government oversight and physician led patient care.